Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Teaching with Your Eyes Closed


Teachers, perhaps more than anyone else, should recognize the intractable fact of inequality

It would be difficult to find a more staunchly left-leaning profession than teaching, at both the public-school and university levels. Although individual instructors may hold conservative views, teachers as a  group are firmly progressivist, committed to "social improvement" through state intervention. Leftist commitment has led schools to embrace a variety of ameliorative causes, most recently, in Canada, a gay-oriented anti-bullying campaign that is at times stridently anti-Christian (though also, ironically enough, pro-Muslim) and a zealous environmentalist philosophy that teaches children to condemn oil and gas production.

Perhaps the most notable and pervasive form of teacher progressivism is egalitarianism, the commitment not only to equality of opportunity but also to equality of outcome as a social goal. This is a form of utopian thinking that radically minimizes or outright denies  differences in human ability and intelligence, ascribing to social factors such as class privilege and "ableism" all significant variations in student performance.  (more...)

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